A Million Pieces of Home

Unless there’s terrible news Africa doesn’t get much notice in this part of the world. But at the Venice Biennale six years ago it was the object of thousands of beauty-bedazzled eyes, even if some of those eyes didn’t know at first what they were looking at.

One of that show’s most popular sights was an immense sheet of undulant light floating, floor to ceiling, at the very end of the Biennale’s main, long, cavernous exhibition hall, the Arsenale. In a city of mosaics, it could have been a super-mosaic, inlaid in silver and gold, or a fabulous gold-threaded tapestry, its surface broken by shimmering swags and folds. Distance made a difference in understanding. When you moved closer you saw that the whole glinting thing was pieced together from countless tiny parts: pieces of colored metal pinched and twisted into strips, squares, circles and rosettes, linked together, like chain mail, with bits of copper wire.

Closer still, very close, you could make out words printed on some of the metal scraps: Bakassi, Chelsea, Dark Sailor, Ebeano, King Solomon, Makossa, Top Squad.

Some of them sounded foreign, non-European. So, when you learned it, did the artist’s name: El Anatsui. Hard to place geographically, it was just beginning to ring international art-world bells. He’s from Ghana, you heard, or Nigeria.

This was perception-altering information. Suddenly, in that great sheet of light, you saw Africa, not Europe; kente cloth, not Baroque tapestry. That the metal pieces looked like scrap material became significant. Clichés clicked into place: Africa = recycling. And art that, a moment before, was simply blow-away gorgeous was now exotically mysterious.

The mystery wasn’t so much in the art itself as in the Western cultural politics surrounding it. How, against stacked odds, did art by an African artist become the centerpiece of the world’s most prestigious contemporary showcase? Historically black artists from Africa had achieved international attention only when they lived and worked outside the continent. And then, paradoxically, their art was embraced to the extent that it advertised African-ness. Mr. Anatsui’s Venetian tour de force fit neither criterion.

Now, six years later, those “how did this happen?” questions may again arise for a new audience around the sparkling retrospective exhibition “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” which just opened at the Brooklyn Museum. But time has made a difference. Mr. Anatsui’s art has been visible in major public collections. Books have been written. (The best of them is “El Anatsui: Art and Life by Susan Mullin Vogel.) Films have been made. We know more about him than we once did.

He was born in 1944 in Ghana, which was then the British colony of Gold Coast. His father was a fisherman and master weaver of kente cloth, a skill Mr. Anatsui himself never learned.

Instead he studied art in high school and university programs conceived on British models and staffed with European teachers. At the same time he made an effort to immerse himself in local Ghanaian traditions. “When I left art school, my idea was to try to indigenize — to get a bit of indigenous material into my psyche,” he once told an interviewer. And his first work as a professional artist, in the early 1970s, was local in a literal way.

It was a series of wall pieces made from wooden display trays collected in town markets. On the surface of each tray, using hot iron bars, he scorched graphic symbols from Ghanaian textiles, symbols of myth and memory. Seen in a Western context the results looked abstract; in Africa they had specific meaning. The combination of apparent ornamentalism and usefulness answered to the aesthetic values of two very different cultures.

The series also established features that would characterize much of his future output: a reliance on mediums close at hand, portability and abstraction. There was a measure of humor. It must have amused market workers to see plain old fruit trays so elevated. And, in what was fundamentally conceptual art, there were social and spiritual dimensions. The trays originally held food, which carried associations of abundance, want and generosity. The textiles from which the graphic symbols came were often used for funeral wear.

In 1975 Mr. Anatsui was invited to teach sculpture at the University of Nigeria in the town of Nsukka. It became his new and, so far, permanent home, a stimulating one with a lively creative community that included the influential painters Uche Okeke and Chike Aniakor.

Soon after arrival he started making ceramic sculptures in the form of shattered and patched-together versions of traditional pots, their interiors filled with seething, snakelike forms. These were fierce, agitated, disintegrative objects, responses to his own mood of displacement, or to a post-colonial Africa entering dire, disillusioning times.

The sense of turbulence continued when he returned to wood as a medium. In 1980, during a residency at the Cummington Community in Massachusetts, he adopted power tools — drills and chain saws — to make sculpture. Back in Nsukka he stayed with an unruly, sometimes brutalist style of gouging and slicing. And, as with the pots, fragmentation was a preferred mode, in relief sculptures composed of several separate panels designed to be randomly combined and recombined.

Photo

The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

In the 1980s his reputation in Africa was building. He worked nonstop and produced a lot, experimentally moving among and combining mediums in ways that few of his colleagues were. Through periodic residencies, like the one at Cummington, he stayed tuned into developments abroad, some of which would affect him significantly.Multiculturalism was in the air in the West, and starting to shape the market. High-profile shows like the 1989 “Magicians of the Earth” in Paris included, however marginally, new art from Africa. By 1990, when the Studio Museum in Harlem sent curators to Nigeria to scout for its “Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition,” Mr. Anatsui was high on the go-to list.

And when five artists from that exhibition were chosen for the 1990 Venice Biennale, he was one. The occasion was historic; it was the first time sub-Saharan artists had been in the Venice show. And the experience was invaluable. Not only was his art seen in an international forum, he also got a sweeping look at what the European-American market was promoting, much of it installation art on a spectacular scale.

Within a few years his career trajectory, already high in Africa, began to ascend abroad. In 1995 a London dealer, who came across a video of him sculpturing with a chain saw, offered a show that coincided with the city’s breakthrough Africa ’95 Festival. In the same year a traveling museum solo show in Japan came through. And in 1996 in New York the dealer Skoto Aghahowa, intent on positioning new African art in a global context, paired Mr. Anatsui in a show with Sol LeWitt.

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A tipping point, or the start of one, arrived in 1998, when Mr. Anatsui invented a new art form. One day, by his own account, on a routine scavenging hunt through Nsukka, he picked up a trash bag filled with twist-off liquor bottle tops of a kind manufactured by Nigerian distilleries. Although it took him a while to realize it, he had found his ideal material: locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded.

Liquor had come to Africa with colonialism. Production of rum propelled the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Later Africa had made a double-edged European import its own. And the history of all that was printed, in shorthand, in the brand names on the bottle tops: Bakassi, Chelsea, Dark Sailor, Ebeano.

In addition, crucially, the metal was visually magnetic. The colors — reds, yellows, silvers, golds — were bold and bright. And it was easy to manipulate, to “fold, crumple, crush,” to quote the title of a documentary film on Mr. Anatsui made in 2011 by Ms. Vogel, a curator and former professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University.

Finally the bottle caps answered Mr. Anatsui’s growing interest in expanding the scale of his art. Pressed flat, twisted, or cut into circles, then punctured, the caps could be wired together into panels or blocks, which were joined to form pliant, fabriclike sheets, each sheet a whole made of fragments, and, potentially at least, endlessly expandable. “When I started working with the bottle caps,” he said recently during a trip the United States, “I thought I’d make one or two things with them, but the possibilities began to seem endless.”The labor involved was arduous but communal, a kind of three-step performance. Studio workers in Nsukka made the initial blocks. Mr. Anatsui determined the configuration of the blocks into a larger works. Whoever installed the finished piece could hang and drape it as they pleased. No way was the only way, no way was permanent.

And when a piece, no matter how large, came down, it could be folded up to fit in the equivalent of a suitcase or trunk.

Mr. Anatsui has treated similar mediums comparably; as early as 1998 he was wiring together milk-can tops to create floor-bound sculptures. But for charisma and variety, the bottle-top hangings are unsurpassed, as evident in the nine examples in the new retrospective, conceived by Ellen Rudolph for the Akron Art Museum, and installed in Brooklyn by Kevin Dumouchelle.

Surfaces are clotted and encrusted in one example, or appear like openwork lace in another. Mr. Anatsui himself compares his metal work to painting and sees the show as a record of his move from the equivalent of oils to watercolor, “from opaqueness to transparency.”

The palette can be solid and bold, or as mixed and nuanced as a hazed-over wildflower field. Several titles — “Earth’s Skin,” “Ozone Layer” — have ecological associations. But like the earlier ceramic and wood-panel sculptures they speak in universal terms of decay and regeneration.

It’s surely no accident that the exhibition’s title, which is also the title of a stunning 2009 hanging, comes from the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-43). Weil lived the life of both a social and spiritual activism, and Mr. Anatsui’s art may be considered in those terms.

His is eminently public work, with a subtle commentarial undertow. This is true of a piece called “Broken Bridge II” that he recently installed on a building facade near the High Line in Chelsea. An immense, pieced-together mural made partly of mirrorlike material, it gives a narcissistic city and art world capital a fractured, yet sky-flooded view of itself.

Outdoors is the direction Mr. Anatsui wants to go in the future; he will be doing an installation on the exterior of the Royal Academy in London in the spring and another in Amsterdam. Large but light and lighter is the goal. “I’m working toward buoyancy,” he said.

Will that buoyant art be African? Western?

Neither, or rather both, in ways that make such categories expansive rather than confining. It will be the art of someone who, through a combination of brilliance, hard work and circumstance — the same factors that shape most major art careers — has become a global star and has achieved that status by working at home, finding a grand and modest beauty there, and spreading that beauty everywhere.

Correction: February 24, 2013

An article on Feb. 10 about the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui misstated part of the name of the work that he recently installed on a building facade near the High Line in Chelsea. It is “Broken Bridge II,” not “Broken Bridges II.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2013, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Million Pieces of Home. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe